[Advice] Work + Job = Labor

68.5% of employees in American workplaces are either actively disengaged or not engaged with the work that they are doing at all.

This is due to many issues and factors, including the absence of support from other people in doing the labor that matters most. Managers, supervisors, and business leaders, don’t often think that emotional labor has much value because it’s not easily measureable, quantifiable, or knowable.

The other factor that causes employees to either actively disengage or just not engage, is a lack of understanding about the difference between work, a job, and labor. For far too long we have confused those three terms. So let’s get some clarity:

Work is passion. It’s the thing that lights up an engaged employee in the morning. Some employees are engaged by tracking numbers on spread sheets, and some employees are engaged by dealing with difficult people. The vast majority of employees are disengaged with work that they didn’t start being passionate about in the morning, and will forget the second they get home.

A job is series of tasks for which employees get paid. But then again, maybe not. Employee’s jobs are often confused with the term work. However, tasks rarely get employees engaged in the workplace due to gaming of the internal organizational reward and promotion system, strong at the workplace social sanctioning, and continual conflicts between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for accomplishing tasks.

Labor is the combination of work (passion) plus a series of tasks (job) that spool out across the overall life of an employee. The term “labor” is often only used in the economic sense to describe a series of discreet outputs. But, for the not engaged or actively disengaged employee, labor is a continual drudgery, full of disappointment, stress, conflict, and confusion. Labor is something to be abandoned as soon as the workday ends, and dreaded as soon as the weekend closes, to be put down with relief at retirement.

Managers, supervisors, and business leaders, as well as organizations on the whole, have a social responsibility that goes beyond sharing profits, engaging in wage transparency, or working collaboratively within a local, national, or international context. They have the responsibility to their current and future employees, to create opportunities for engaging in work that will dovetail with individual passions, in the pursuit of a lifetime of long-term emotional labor.

Otherwise, social conflict, organizational collapses, and fewer and fewer outsized rewards accruing to an ever shrinking pool of employees, is one of many possible, conflict-filled futures.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
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[Strategy] Different Mediums

The medium is not the message.

Or so it is said.

And if the most important thing is sending a message, what do you do when no one is using the same medium that you are, in order to hear the message, you want to send in the first place?

This is the trouble that leads to polarization in modern communication scenarios, as well as increases rates of conflicts, and escalations in the course of conflicts. It’s not about everybody speaking the same language (which we often think is the solution, either through training or codifying language in general); it’s about everybody communicating using different mediums.

And when my medium of choice for delivering (or receiving) a message of choice, is not your medium of choice for receiving (or delivering) a message you think that I need to hear, then conflicts, confusion, and escalation are bound to increase, not decrease.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Difference Between Management and Leadership

Managing is a process—similar to conflict—of implementing, developing, and encouraging employees to accomplish predetermined goals. Much of managing in the modern world represents the fully realized theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and his ideas about productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Leadership is a relationship—similar to engagement, resolution, and communication around conflict—between followers in an organization and their leaders. Much of leadership in modern organizations rests on the concepts of authority, transaction, charisma, or some other mystical, in-borne trait. Modern leadership also doesn’t examine the role of followers in an organization.

Management is not leadership. A competent manager knows the strengths and weaknesses of the overall work team and is diligent in learning strategies and techniques to take that team to the next level in production, efficiency, and effectiveness. And if some of the people following can’t get on board, there is always the option to fire people.

Leadership is not management. A competent leader strives to go beyond merely knowing the relative strengths and weaknesses of their overall work team, and instead seeks to discover—and grow—relationships between followers, as well as between the leaders and the followers. Leadership requires doing things that don’t scale (emotional labor), engaging with conflict (leaving a comfort zone), and initiating changes and innovation (not being afraid of failure).

Leadership requires grit and grows resiliency. It also demands that the person doing the leading avoid seeking assurance and reassurance from followers; but, instead that they be guided by their own internal principles and be able to articulate those to followers. Managing requires keen observation, willingness to follow direction, and the ability to articulate those observations and directions up and down a hierarchical chain.

Too often, too many organizations seek to impose leadership on people who should be managers. Employees look for leadership from people who have attained status, but not skills. And supervisors, and managers, become frustrated, overwhelmed, disheartened, and burnt-out, because they are asked that their reach exceed their grasp, without being asked if there capable of reaching that far anyway.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Heart of Innovation

Leading other people through conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments is the most important leadership labor that many of us will ever do.

But there are a few things working against us:

We are told that anyone can lead, anytime anywhere. This is a unique tick of an American business culture built at the intersection of the myth of rugged individualism and the reality of having to compromise to get along. Many employees believe this idea, but when they are asked, challenged, or offered the opportunity to lead others through uncertainty—without reassurances—many employees fail to even take up the challenge in the first place.

We don’t believe that other people’s conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments, have anything to do with us. Sometimes leading other people through their conflicts requires active listening, engaging in the moment, and caring actively about the other person. This requires leaders to set aside the noise inside of their own head, and to get inside the noise of someone else’s head. Empathy is hard to develop when we are consumed with winning, avoiding, or confronting the chess game of conflicts that we are involved in ourselves.

We don’t see an immediate reward/outcome for engaging, but we do see an immediate reward/outcome for maintain the “status quo.” Conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments sometimes are harbingers that something needs to change in an organization. When they serve as those harbingers, they are a clarion call to disrupt the status quo. But there’s no immediate reward for such behavior in many organizations. As a matter of fact, usually, there is a sanction or unstated penalty. Instead, what gets rewarded with titles, status, and a corner office is going along with the crowd, staying silent, keeping your head down, and avoiding too much responsibility.

The future will be shaped by people who engage courageously in the emotional labor required to lead other people through conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments. The future will be owned by the people (and organizations) who have the courage to go to the other side of the horizon.

That’s innovation.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Why Don’t We Value Compromise?

Ian Bannen’s words from the 1995 film Braveheart, echo through the collective unconsciousness of many organizations—schools, businesses, churches–when people in them consider compromise: “It is precisely our ability to compromise that makes a man noble.”

Many in the workplace associate compromise, not with negotiation strength, but with weakness around positions and principles. Passion is not associated with compromise, nor is exuberance, excitement, or energy. Compromise is typically roundly mocked and is too often viewed as the last outpost of the deceitful and the conniving.

Why do employees in the workplace, members of religious organizations, or even the staff and students of schools, see compromise as something both shameful and necessary?

How negotiation happens, our views on what constitutes a “win” and a “loss,” and our personal passions around the positions we hold, reveal quite a bit about why compromise gets such lousy marketing, yet is still the way that many negotiations around issues that matter, get done.

How negotiation happens—Many people believe that negotiation is a process in which everyone “wins,” there are no “losers,” and all parties can somehow get along. A few people believe that the process of negotiation is one in which many people “lose,” only a few people can “win,” and the parties who lost deserve what happens to them. Both of these views associate the conditions of having to negotiate in the first place with moral failings, rather than associating the conditions of having to negotiate with a systemic, structural failing. Both of these view associate compromise with moral, political, or ethical failure and look upon the need for compromise as a temporary “defeat” in the pursuit of greater, more transformative goals. There are a very few people who view compromise as necessary, process oriented, and frame the negotiations as “win-win” or “lose-lose” for all parties involved.

What constitutes a “win” and a “loss”—Many people misuse terms “winning” and “losing” and project their own desires, thoughts, and collectively accumulated wisdom onto the negotiation process. And when the process fails, the failure is a reflection on them as people, rather than on the process itself. There are very few people who can “lose and laugh.” The vast majority of us inject our personal views and beliefs on fairness, right and wrong, and who has power and who doesn’t into determining which party has “won,” “lost,” or compromised unneccessarily in a negotiation.

Our personal passions—This has been noted before, but it bears repeating that principles are based in values, traditions, and narratives that give meaning to each party in a conflict. Principles spring directly from deeply held passions, but too often we use the language of positions to express (or to obfuscate) our passions. Many individuals and organizations confuse their interests for their principles. What follows form such confusion is social shaming, public bullying, and even emotional, legal and cultural efforts to engage in destruction of the character of the other party in the negotiation.

Ian Bannen’s other line from Braveheart also rings true: “Uncompromising men are easy to admire.”

How difficult is it to be uncompromising in your own conflicts in your own life?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] A New Mental Model of Trust

The mental model for trust is broken in workplaces.

The old model looked like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) loyally for a period of time (X) and, with enough reciprocation, I stay with you for the remainder of my career.

That mental model is one that only works under the specific economic conditions of the 1940’s through the 1970’s in America. However, since there is one thing that America does really well (the marketing of America to every other country in the world) as the mental model rubs up against changing economic reality, there is friction everywhere, between those people who want that model, and those people who are trying to create a new model. Employees at organizations of all kinds are in the midst of a great cultural, economic, philosophical, and social destruction of that old mental model and at the same moment are carving out a new mental model.

This new model (right now) looks like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) but not so loyally, and I take my accumulated intellectual capital from your workplace to another workplace, whenever it suits me, because you may not be around in five years.

There’s a lot of talk from employees, organizations, management thought leaders, and others about the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change in Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., and the media centers of Los Angeles and New York City. But if you go to places outside of Madison, Wisconsin, or outside of Peoria, Illinois, or travel four hours north of New York City and talk to employees of organizations still struggling to maintain a semblance of the old model, the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change that get talked about breathlessly in those other places, get addressed in tones of defeatism, regret, and anger.

This tone and its lived reality is also a mental model. And the employees who exist inside the new mental model may out innovate, out disrupt, and out change the employees longing for a return to the old mental model; but, there must be ways to develop every potential employee together, without brutal economic and social Darwinism being the answer.

Here are the three ways to shift organizational mental models:

Access to the means of production is the linchpin: As more and more resources, time, and talent gravitates towards developing digital products, services, and processes there are questions about whether “everyone” can be a computer scientist. This is a red herring argument. Access to the means of production means high speed Internet in a neighborhood, whether you’re 50 miles outside of Overland, Kansas, or in the heart of downtown Miami. Such access shifts the mental model of ‘The-Internet-as-an-Entertainment-Vehicle’ to ‘The Internet- as-a- Economic-Development-Vehicle.’

Valuing and incentivizing emotional labor:I talk about this repeatedly, but it bears writing yet again: The mental model of what constitutes work in the workplace has to shift towards valuing and incentivizing employees who can collaborate, get along, and manage conflict in a competent and healthy fashion in a dynamic, globally competitive environment. This is the core of laboring with mind and emotions, versus laboring with hands and muscles. Both can be rewarded, but the incentives toward the labor which can be repeated until a person is on death’s door must be made infinitely more robust in workplaces.

Hiring for mental models rather than personality traits: As algorithms and computers have entered more and more into the hiring matrix of organizations, more and more creative, innovative, and change oriented people with growth-mindsets are abandoning all hope of being hired in some organizations, and are migrating to large cities where their value can be rewarded. Abandoning all of the hiring tools is not the point. The point is, how people perceive their agency in the world, based on what they’ve accomplished in the past (stuff that’s not listed on the resume and doesn’t get picked up by the algorithm), will matter more and more for discovering and hiring employees of value.

If organizations can shift their own mental models around these three areas, then they will survive and thrive as the century continues to unwind, with employees all over the world, who will be loyal, trustworthy, innovative, and change oriented. This new mental model may share some aspects with the old model, but it will survive future economic, social, technological, and cultural shocks which we can’t see coming.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] An Easy Dismissal…

To dismiss positions, parties, and interests that we’d rather not acknowledge exist in the first place, is a sign of the inability to negotiate deeply.

The terms that are used to dismiss those positions, parties, and interests that we’d rather not acknowledge exist in the first place, include (but aren’t limited to) “Well, the consensus is…,” or “The conventional wisdom says…,” or my personal favorite “Everybody knows that…”

When a dismissal is preceded by any of these three statements, it reveals a lack of empathy, curiosity, or even ability, to get inside another party’s mental model of how “the world” works. Such dismissals also reveal a deeper fear: That maybe our own position really isn’t as black and white as we think that it is; and, that disagreement, dispute, or dismissal of our own position by the other party, might be on the horizon.

A dismissal in a negotiation, indicates that we have made the negotiation less about accomplishing goals, getting to agreement around interests, and establishing common ground. Instead, a dismissal shows that we have made the negotiation content personal, the desire for a favorable outcome for us paramount, and that there is emotional residue that we must address on our own part.

Hiding behind conventional wisdom, making appeals to “what everybody knows” to be “true,” or drawing on consensus to persuade, is not a sign of confidence in our own position. Instead, it’s a rallying cry for someone to come and support our right position and to negate the other party’s wrong position.

In negotiations around value based interests, the ability to empathize (but not agree) with the other party, and to do so using language that elevates supporters and reassures detractors, is the sign of a true statesman.

How many statesmen are in your workplace?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What Collaboration Would Look Like in Your Organization

In the workplace, employees, managers, and supervisor all say they desire more collaboration overall, but in particular when conflicts arise. The desire for greater collaboration is often conflated with more teamwork, or strong team bonding, or building better teams at work, but collaboration is not any of these things. And, much of this stated desire is based in generating more productivity per person in order to generate larger bottom line profits.

The other drawback to collaboration is that the rewards for engaging in it (in the majority of organizations) are not outsized, but the losses in the event of failure are. Collaboration is still viewed by many organizations as The Alamo; that is, the place to make an organizational “last stand” when the resources run out.

However, when what matters is internal (employee) and external (customer) organizational trust, workplaces would be well advised to consider collaboration as a key metric of moving an organization forward and past conflicts and disagreements. This metric becomes even more of the platinum standard when an organization is in an industry space of rapid change and uncertain outcomes. Both of these factors create stressors on internal and external constituents and can lead to conflicts—places where collaboration actually is a useful tool.

We have an idea of what the collaboration mode should look like in actual practice, but as a behavioral choice in conflict, here are some high points:

The novice collaboration mode is marked by initial mistrust of other parties in the conflict (based on past relationships, current secondary conflict issues, the nature and content of the conflict at hand, etc.); but, is also based in the strong desire to work with the other party to get to resolution for the self, rather than the organization.
The advanced beginner collaboration mode is marked by growing trust and belief in the efficacy of individual personal emotional strengths in addressing the conflict scenario. This mode is also marked by growing resiliency and confidence in the resolution process itself (negotiation, mediation, arbitration, etc.).
The competent collaboration mode is marked by a desire to grow other parties in the conflict to the level of collaboration that this mode has already achieved. This mode of competency is also marked by frustration when parties refuse (or are incapable) of growing out of their own modes and toward collaboration.
The proficient performer collaboration mode is marked by a determination to allow other parties in conflict the autonomy to choose whatever mode they would like to choose to get to resolution (e.g. assertiveness, avoidance, accommodation, competing/controlling, etc.) but to not get “caught up” in those modes. Other party self-determination (and preserving that self-determination) becomes key at the proficiency stage.
The expert collaboration mode is marked by open communication, authenticity, honesty, as well as positivity and patience. This mode allows for other parties in the conflict to determine their own path through the conflict, but also advocates for collaboration as the ultimate mode of addressing issues.

In the workplace, collaboration is rarely seen, and is mostly associated with individuals who have attained emeritus status in an organization. Freed from the daily competition based in an organizational cultural perception of resource lack, those individuals become organizational ambassadors and diplomates in this mode.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What Competing-Controlling Looks Like in Your Organization

The entire history of humanity shows that responding to a complex conflict environment with the competition/controlling mode generates outsized rewards, and little downside, to the individuals who choose it as a mode of addressing conflict.

Wars, battles, fights, riots, pogroms, demonstrations, marches—all are forms, shades, and methods of competing with other people and groups and “winning” control over resources that may have been scarce in the past, but may be more abundant now.

In workplaces, competency at controlling other people, the space of conflicts, and even the resources that go into conflicts, generates outsized rewards in status, money, and position for individuals. In workplaces, competition is fostered (either through overt messaging or through covert cultural conditioning) as a way to separate “winners” from “losers” or “A” players from “everyone else.” The rewards for engaging in these types of competitions are outsized, as are the losses—of face, reputation, authority, and status.

Many of the other responses to conflict scenarios that people are competent at—including accommodating, passive-aggressiveness, assertiveness, and avoiding—are, at their root, responses to organizational work cultures that value competition and controlling in a conflict scenario over other potential responses. Those other responses are deemed organizationally useful as downsides, for situations where “everyone else” fights over the leftovers from the “A” players’ tables.

We all know what competency at controlling and competing looks like, but here are some behavioral high points:

The novice competitor/controller mode focuses on hiding competitive desires and manipulates behind the scenes. Sometimes this behavior will be confused with passive-aggressiveness, or hostility.
The advanced beginner competitor/controller mode focuses on developing elaborate plans to deceive other parties in conflict, and even to involve other people who have little to nothing to do with the actual conflict itself, but who have access to outsized resources.
The competent competitor/controller mode manipulates parties in conflict at a high level, and can also mask intentions through avoiding direct confrontation, using others to accomplish goals, and spread gossip and rumors without accountability.
The proficient performer competitor/controller mode advances through an organization by engaging in ignoring and minimizing past mistakes when confronted with them and removing people from positions that could report previous poor performance, bad judgment, or choices.
The expert competitor/controller mode attains outsized rewards, (i.e. personal, financial, organizational, etc.) but role models this behavior as a cultural response to conflicts in the organization, thus setting the table for future repeating of the same behavior.

If this all reads like the HBO show Game of Thrones to you (or a description of the political process in many contemporary countries) you would be correct. However over time, many organizations have developed crisis and resource poverty mindset-based cultures, focused around varied degrees of competition/controlling when faced with conflict scenarios, and many more will be focused in that way in the future, as communication and information increases transparency globally.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Down-Sides of Assertiveness in the Workplace

When there is a confrontation at work, the competency type we most envision others being in (and ourselves) is that of the assertive type.

People who demonstrate assertiveness advocate for what they want, look out for other people on the team, and are aware, but are not bound by, the restrictions of the organization. They are perceived as honest brokers, and sharp communicators who can get what they want, when they want it, how they want it, while also recognizing the reactions and responses of other people.

Assertiveness in response to conflicts at work is viewed as a net plus overall (there’s even assertiveness training on the market), in the face of the other types we’ve explored for the competency model. This type is celebrated and most written business advice is provided for the perspective and growth of the assertive type rather than the other types.

Of course, there are three down-sides to this way of thinking:

People are rarely assertive all the time, whether in their daily communication or in their approach to workplace conflicts and issues
People who communicate indirectly are sometimes not perceived by direct communicators as being assertive, ever though they really are—but just from behind the scenes.
People who demonstrate assertiveness sometimes give the impression of being bullies, manipulative, or even being controlling, to other competency types who would prefer to either avoid conflict entirely, or to accommodate it and move on.

Healthy, positive assertiveness in the workplace is a tactic, not a strategy, for overcoming workplace conflicts and can be dynamite when used sparingly. However, in the hard charging, profit driven world of business, a lack of assertiveness is interpreted by others as being weakness.

In the conflict competency model of the 21^st century, assertiveness will matter both more and less than it did before.

-Peace Be With You All-